It has been around a month now since I started serving custom ads on my girlfriends site. I won’t give away the URL, but just know that it gets around 2 – 10k traffic per day. Unfortunately it got booted from adsense, and once you end up in that position, you can only really go on your own. The rest of the ad networks are really poor at serving relevant ads (Bidvertiser, Im looking at you!). Infact at times they were sending flash ads that had color changes at 50 times a second, and would give 99% of the population a seizure (Once again bidvertiser). So I started trying to serve up relevant CPA offers, and regular ads to viewers of the site.
In all, You don’t really need to know how I did it. In the simplest of terms, I used this tutorial here : http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/geo-targeting-ads/. I basically created a small PHP function that would echo different banners based on the country of the visitors. Pretty easy, nothing special. And you can do it piss easy using the tutorial.
Anyway, One day I was working on the site and I noticed ads weren’t showing. At this time, there was just plain banners to other parts of the site (So non-ads really). And yet these weren’t showing up. It took me a good while to work out what the heck was going on. And eventually I realised that it was the “Adblock” addon for Firefox. For a while, I was in a state of panic as to why these were getting blocked. I mean ffs, it is just a plain image, served from my own website. So why would it block it?
Well I dug a little deeper into how adblock works. Unsurprisingly, for the most part it just blocks certain domains being allowed to send through data. So just as an example, if Google’s ad server was located at ads.googleadwords.com. Then it would simply block that domain from being able to display on Firefox. I’m not entirely sure, But I think the data still gets sent through, but it’s just not displayed. Anyway this didn’t really help me. The ads were being served from my own domain and obviously my domain wasn’t on this ad domain list.
So I dug deeper.
Well actually not that deep. Was fairly obvious from just looking at the blocked url list.
/adtop.js
/adtrack/*
/adtraff.
/adtype.
/adunit.
/adunits/*
/advert-
/advert.
/advert/*
/advert?
/advert_
/advertise-
/advertise.
/advertise/*
/advertisement-
/advertisement.
/advertisement/*
/advertisement_
Now wtf is this you may ask? This is just a small fraction of the huge list of banned Folder and File names. Yes not domains, But actual folder names. For me personally, I had my ads coming from www.mydomain.com/geoads/adserver.php. “adserver.” is a blocked filename, and hence my ads were not being shown.If any file is named adserver, then it will be blocked from loading.
I ended up renaming all my folders + files so that they would now serve ads. But still, it amazes me the lengths people will do to, just to block a few ads. And in this case, they weren’t ads, but just simply banners to other parts of the site.
If you are serving your own ads, You had best name your folders/files wacky names to get around them. Otherwise chances are they are getting blocked.
Hey wade, for a movie streaming site, what kind of ads you suggest and company to use rather than a gateway?
Well, Adsense will eventually boot you. So you can either use CPA offers as banners, or use something like adbrite. I rotate them around.
For the most part I use a passthrough on adbrite (Or any ad network), so that you can get the maximum out your ad space.
Also if you have videos, read this : http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/building-your-own-adcontent-gateway-using-dhtml-popups/
Builts a “gateway” that is more like an overlay ad.
The custom built gateway with the geo tracking ads is perfect, thanks